Delete Instagram account: How to do it, permanent or temporary

Contenuti

Intro

In recent years we have seen a tremendous growth of Instagram, which has allowed this application to be used in every part of the world by more than a billion users. The U.S.-based social network based on photo and video sharing born in 2010 is certainly one of the most widely used social networks around the globe at the moment. The ability to share stories, posts, and get a glimpse into the daily lives of most of the world’s celebrities make it one of the most popular social networks among users. This social is also used a great deal by young people, who take advantage of posts and stories as a tool for social interaction. Despite all this, so many people wish to delete their instagram account in the article we will verdict why.

On the other hand, if you want to know how to unsubscribe from Facebook you will find everything in our article: How to unsubscribe from facebook

The use of social media, however, is abused by many people, who use much of their time checking for new posts and periodically updating their profiles. Clearly, the problem affects not only Instagram but also Facebook, Tik Tok, Clubhouse and many other social networks on the Internet. Between viral posts and videos, so many users spend a large part of their day behind screens every day, and many come to develop an addiction toward these types of platforms.

Using social can be a pastime, a job, and also a way to meet new people or keep in touch with friends and family. Social media seem to have become necessary for a little bit of everyone, and also because of the quarantine effect, a great many users are increasingly addicted to the Internet.

According to some statistics from 2019, thus before the chaos generated by the pandemic, social network users spend an average of 2 hours and 20 minutes per day on these applications. The numbers clearly increased during the quarantine and are currently higher than in past years.

For this reason, some users are making up their minds to eitherpermanently delete Instagram and their account, or avoid using it for a set period, so as to reduce the hours spent in front of the screen and invest the time in other activities.

Therefore, in this article, we will look at what we need to do to get our Instagram account out of the way temporarily or delete it permanently. If you are intent on performing either of these procedures, you will find everything you need in this guide so that you can operate according to your needs.

Some good reasons to get off Instagram (and other social)

In this section we will find some very good reasons to consider eliminating social from our lives permanently, or try doing it temporarily and see the progress on our lives.

Let us start with the fact that the influence of social media on our lives is constantly underestimated, underlying this phenomenon we find certain aspects of the functioning of these applications that manage to influence our thinking to the point of changing our behavior.

The great deception created by social network algorithms

The algorithms used by these programs are among the most powerful and best developed in the realm of the Internet; to them we consciously or unconsciously hand over our data and preferences in the form of likes, shares, comments, and posts. These algorithms use information to understand what we want to see on our page and what interests us, so that they provide us with content that is very close to our expectations, ideas, and value system. This creates a kind of content bubble, usually called a filter bubble, which represents our reality from the eyes of social. In this place, everything seems to be made especially for us, reflecting our thoughts, our values, but all this is merely a well-conceived hallucination.

This usually happens after we have been using social networks for a while, and having reached this point we virtually lose our free will. Once our bubble is ready, we are no longer faced with a set of different possibilities, but the system starts presenting us with posts, images, and stories made just for us, and at this point our behavior is bound to change and suffer all the negative effects of this situation.

Having reached a point where it becomes difficult to choose posts freely, the major consequence is to become worse people, more angry, conceited and prone to avoid any opinion and fact that clashes with our set of ideas and values. The social system also grants greater visibility to content with high engagement rates, which are in most cases, news and topics capable of sparking furious discussions, offenses and arguments. This usually happens due to the simple fact that negative content usually receives a lot of comments, interactions and related notifications that make it visible longer than positive content.

This makes social media a place increasingly populated by hoaxes, fake news, provocative comments, factional clashes and personal attacks. This kind of social use, in addition to taking time away from real interactions, wastes our time in avoidable and futile discussions.

Overcoming the fear of disconnection will improve our lives

Fear of disconnection, also called FOMO, short for Fear of Missing Out, is the fear of missing out on something important and unique. This syndrome makes us constantly think about what is going on in social, and convinces us that we must always be informed about everything that is happening. This mechanism can trigger in us the need to peek into the lives of others, and make us feel doubt and envy toward other people whose careers, vacations, relationships and lives are better and happier than our own.

This perception is obviously false and is often amplified by the connections that are made in these types of programs. This mechanism caused by envy leads many people to ostentatiously display their everydayness, so we can see many people amplify and inflate their experiences by making them seem like unique, unrepeatable moments outside the boring banality of ordinary people.

Another aspect to keep in mind is the huge continuous flow of news we find, belonging to different categories such as soccer, politics, gossip, concerts and current affairs. This content block ends up merging with the posts published by our friends, where we often see major events such as parties, weddings and conceptions. A huge repertoire of information is thus generated, very often of little value, which overwhelms and affects us every day. This is one of the main causes of the social networking addiction that is affecting more and more people. Another science-based cause is the release of endorphins caused by notifications, friend requests, and likes to our posts and stories.

Simple ways to improve the functioning of our Instagram

If we are not convinced that it is a good idea to delete our Instagram profile, or we need to use it for work, it can be a really good idea to take some steps in order to improve the experience we have with our profile.

One of the first things to do is definitely to stop following profiles that frequently post fake news, biased news, and love to make bullying and provocative posts and stories. In addition to getting these profiles out of the way, it is also recommended to stop following accounts that frequently post content that does not interest and annoy us. It seems like an obvious method, but doing this little “contact cleanup” can greatly improve our Instagram home and make our content much more interesting.

Another very useful method is to pay attention to the posts that are suggested to us, especially those where we find the words “Sponsored” and “Suggested Post.” These often sponsored posts are provided to us by the algorithm because we fall into a particular category of people, that is, based on the posts and profiles we like. When we get these posts and they don’t interest or bother us, we can intervene.

In sponsored posts, if we click on the three dots in the upper right-hand part of the post, we can select “Hide Ad,” so that we no longer see that particular post and give a signal to the algorithm that we don’t like that particular thing. As for suggested posts, we can do much the same thing by clicking on the “x” at the top right of the post, and ask Instagram to stop suggesting that type of post and if we want, leave negative feedback as well.

Let us now look at a third method that is very simple but needs to be paid proper attention to, and it concerns precisely the likes we put in during the actual use of this app. Basically, we should always pay attention to each post we decide to like, since each of these preferences will lead the algorithm to always offer us posts that are similar to what we like. A good idea if we want to get a home full of varied, dynamic and different content is to put likes on very different posts and not be too sectional.

Things to know and do before deleting an Instagram account

Getting a social network out of the way temporarily or permanently is always a good idea to consider. This will allow us to have mood benefits and to organize our days optimally, investing time in what interests us most.

Before actually deleting the account, however, we need to know a few things to avoid regretting our decision later.

When we decide to delete our account from a social network, in this case Instagram, our photos, videos, stories and posts will also be permanently deleted. If we value our media files, a great idea is to back up data and save our information and files on our phone.

To download the copy of our information, and have a backup of our shared data and media, we need to follow a few simple steps from a PC or from the desktop version of the Instagram site:

First we need to log in to our Instagram profile and click on the top right of our profile picture.
Now that we are on the menu of our account, let’s select the item “Settings”
When we get to our profile settings page, we click on “Privacy and Security”
We scroll down until we see an item called “Download Data,” at which point, we click “Request Download”
All we have to do is enter the e-mail to which a link to a file containing our account information will be sent. We can receive it in HTML format, which is easier to view, in JSON format, which is easier to import into another service.
We enter the e-mail address where we want to receive the link, select the format we want to receive it, and click “Next”
Now we need to perform the last step by entering the password of our Instagram account and clicking on “Request Download” to have the email sent to us.

Now that we have followed these simple instructions all we have to do is wait for the email and thus obtain the HTML or JSON file containing all the details of our profile.

How to delete your Instagram profile temporarily

If we are interested in a way to get our Instagram profile out of the way for a while without eliminating it permanently and see if we are actually better off without this social, this is the section for us.

We should first know that deactivating our Instagram profile temporarily will cause our photos, comments, likes, and account to be hidden and inaccessible to other users until we decide to reactivate it. This is therefore a time-limited measure, which is usually followed by the permanent deletion of the profile or the complete and total restoration of our content. Clearly unlike this situation, the permanent deletion of the account, also involves the total deletion of data and content.

If we have made this decision and are sure for a while to do without this social, we need to know a few things. First, we have to use the social network’s website, so we will have to use a browser and access the Instagram site. We can do this either from a PC with any browser we use or from a smartphone or tablet using the desktop version of the Instagram site. For those with iPhones or devices running the iOS operating system, the procedure is exactly the same. We can only perform this procedure once a week at most.

Let us now see what are the simple instructions to follow to disable our profile for a while:

First, we need to connect to the official Instagram website using a browser and log in to the account we want to temporarily disable. (If we are from a smartphone we have to select to view the desktop mode of the site from the browser settings)
Now that we are logged in, we click on the main image of our profile found in the upper right corner of the home and select the “Profile” item.
Once we are on the main page of our account, we select “Edit Profile.”
Now that we are in the profile settings, we need to make sure we are in the “Edit Profile” item. Scroll all the way to the bottom to find and click on a blue text labeled “Temporarily deactivate my account.”
At this point Instagram will ask us for feedback on the reason for deactivating the account, and then, we will need to enter our account password to confirm that we are the account owner.
Once these steps are done, all we have to do is click on “Temporarily disable account.”

How to restore a temporarily disabled account

If we have temporarily disabled an Instagram profile and want to regain its use, the procedure is really very simple.

First we need to access the Instagram site from a browser or directly on the app from a smartphone or tablet, at which point we need to log in to our temporarily disabled profile.

At this point our profile will become active again as it was before deactivation. Since in some versions of Instagram, it may happen that our account remains invisible to other users, we will have to go into our profile settings and check if there is an option “Reactivate account.” If this option is present we must click it so that the profile is visible again.

How to delete your Instagram profile permanently

If we are interested in a way to get rid of our Instagram profile forever, eliminating it permanently, this is the section for us.

Remember that it is always highly recommended to back up the photos, videos and information in our profile before following this procedure and deleting the profile.

An account that is deleted deletes photos, comments, likes forever and prevents the creation of another account that has the same username as the deleted one. Again, we need to use the social network’s website, so we will need to use a browser and access the Instagram site. For those with iPhones or devices running the iOS operating system, the procedure is exactly the same. We can do this either from a PC with any browser or from a smartphone or tablet using the desktop version of the Instagram site.

Let us now look at the simple procedure for deleting a profile:

First, we need to connect to the official Instagram website using a browser and log in to the account we want to permanently delete. (If we are from a smartphone we have to select to view the desktop mode of the site from the browser settings)
Now that we are logged in, we click on the main image of our profile found in the upper right corner of the home and select the “Profile” item.
Once we are on the main page of our account, we select “Edit Profile.”
Now that we are in the account settings, we scroll down and click on the “Support” item, after which we click on the “Help Center” item.
Now that we are on the Instagram help center, we enter the phrase “Delete Account” in the search bar. At this point several results will appear, we need to click on the result called “Delete Instagram account.”
We scroll down the page until we find the heading “Here’s how to request permanent deletion of your account:” and then click on the “Instagram.com from a mobile browser or computer.” A text window will open and we will have to click on the blue text “Delete your account.”
An Instagram window will open asking us for feedback on the reason for deactivating the account, and then, we will need to enter our account password to confirm that we are the owner.
Once these steps are done, all we have to do is click on the “Delete” button with the name of our profile.

Once we click on the button that deletes the account, our profile details will be deleted after 30 days. Until the date selected by Instagram arrives, the profile will be invisible on Instagram, somewhat like in cases of temporary deactivation. During this time, if we change our mind, we can log in before the deletion day and also decide to avoid account deletion from the settings.

How to recover a deleted account

Sometimes it happens that you delete an account and later regret this decision, fortunately we have some good news for you, it seems that there are some cases in which it is possible to recover a previously deleted account.

Previously, we said that when a profile is deleted, the content is lost permanently. However, things are not really like that, or rather, they are like that only for the user, this is because some data are saved in social network databases and it is therefore possible for the user to have them returned, even in the form of an account. The only way to get our account back is to get to notify members of Instagram’s help center and hope they can fix the problem for us.

So let’s see what we need to do in order to regain our previously deleted profile through these simple steps:

First, we need to connect to the official Instagram website using a browser. At this point, we need to try logging in with the credentials we were using. (If we are from a smartphone we have to select to view the desktop mode of the site from the browser settings)
After trying to log in, we will get an item that says “Get Login Assistance,” and we will have to click on it.
At this point, a new page will open, where we should find “Access Problems.” Usually this page is not very helpful, so we will need to click on “I need more help,” which will take us to another new page.
Now, we need to enter the e-mail address we were using when we registered on Instagram, usually an e-mail is also asked to communicate.
Next, we will need to specify the type of account that has been deleted or stolen, then provide indications as to whether it is a corporate account or a personal account, and most importantly, indicate whether there is a photo of us in the account.
At this point we will have to click on “My account has been hacked,” and wanting to also provide “Any additional details.”
Going forward, we may find an item labeled “Request Support,” clicking it will give us the opportunity to get help by following a procedure, at the end of which, we will receive an e-mail, sometimes days later.
In the email we will be asked to answer some questions and requests to verify that we are the rightful owners of the account. In most cases, we will be asked to send a photo holding a piece of paper on which we will write the name of the account and the verification code provided to us by the social workers.
If our account contains at least one of our photos it will be much easier to retrieve it. Otherwise, the chances of recovering a deleted profile usually are very low. In any case, the last thing to do is to respond to the e-mail by filling out the verification document.
In case our old profile does not contain our photos or the procedure does not work, we need to seek help on Instagram’s help center until we get in touch with an operator. If this also does not work, we can try looking for help on the Meta or Facebook help center, up to and including asking an operator for help.

Let us specify that there is a big difference between a disabled account and a deleted account. Recovering a disabled profile, i.e., one that has been hidden for a certain period of time, is very easy and does not require much effort, while recovering a deleted one is almost always a hard path with no certain outcome. When it comes to recovering an account, a lot depends on the service center operators, some times it can take a long time to recover it, while in some cases we will be prevented from getting it back and will have to create a new one if we want to use this app again.